Who needs rollercoasters?
May. 25th, 2020 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormSo.
I've been fighting some hard days, especially since I wrote that plant retrospective post. Even those tiny, safe windows into my past tha I have access to leave me dissociative, irritable, and with the equivalent emotional feeling to the physical of really intense burns or some other constant searing pain. I think I'm coming out of it a little now.
That experience, the feeling of just having the emotional pain switch set "on" regardless of what I think about or do... I've got better at handling my actions while it's on, sometimes, but there's often just no way to make it go away while it's happening. Many hours of hard labour a day are hella preventative. I need to pump up my bike tires and make sure they hold air, or start running, or something. The farm is intense work but not the same.
Speaking of the farm: I got new geese on the weekend. I was supposed to get 3 new geese: a pilgrim gander (good for a spread of genetics) and a pair of white Chinese. There was a lady in town trying to get rid of them. When she showed up, she said that the gander had an abcess from fighting (there were 2 ganders and 1 goose at her place) and she was inclined to keep him back and keep compresses etc on the swelling. I took the pair of white Chinese and gave her a pilgrim girl who'd been sitting on a nest, then lost her nest. That way her gander could have a companion, and he wouldn't have the Chinese geese to fight with.
I put my lovely, sweet, calm new geese in the strip of grass by the road: lots of room, fenced in away from the dogs and other geese, lots of grass and dandelions. I checked them a couple times, left them water, and came into the house. A couple hours later Avallu came to get me, whining: I'm not sure if it was because he was locked out of that area or because he knew something was wrong. He led me over to the new goose field.
I found the beautiful new goose semi-hanging by one wing. Her wing was impaled on a nail through a 2x4, the nail went all the way through. She could reach the ground, she wasn't quite on tiptoe, but she was not able to pull herself off or stand/lie down comfortably. She was just hanging there. I took her off and she bled a fair bit, steadily, a couple big drips per second. I brought her into the house, put corn starch on the wound, and then took her back out to be with her gander. She drank some water but her wing was hanging -- how long had she been out there?
Tucker was coming over for dinner anyhow. I debated with myself and did a bunch of internet research: I had some penicillin, a long-acting and a quick-acting one, for the pigs. There were no on-label instructions for poultry or geese, and very little online. Should I give her an antibiotic and risk getting it wrong (doseage and also it's very hard to intramuscularly inject a goose with a solid 3" pad of feathers on the breast) or should I wait and see if there was an infection, then have to hit her harder with antibiotics? In the end I gave her the long-acting one, 0.35ml in the left breast. She had stopped bleeding by then. I confined her and her gander in the goose nesting space beside the back door so I could keep an eye on them: she was and has been pretty pale but is standing and walking and moving. Her wing continues to trail a little, I have no idea how much damage was done to it. I don't see fresh blood.
I feel terrible about it: I hadn't expected the geese would climb on that pile of boards, and didn't really give those nails a second thought as I would have if I'd put pigs or something in there. Also, both geese are so sweet and calm, they haven't hissed once and they're great with people. And they are beautiful graceful birds.
That would have been Saturday; also Saturday I noticed Apricot's vulva was swelling and she was bagging up, so I put hay in all the pig houses (I learned!). Sunday there were 7 healthy active new piglets trying to nurse. I have to admit, I have trouble with very new piglets: when they're born they tend to be skinny and shivery for a couple days and I worry about them. I worry about them enough that I put off castrating, in fact, and then after a couple days they're fat and running around everywhere.
Apricot is not as chill with me around her babies as Penny was: I scratch behind her ears but haven't got in the house with her. She's still learning how not to squish them: she'll sit down slowly but still catch one and get up again, then be a little distressed. I consider this to be new mother issues rather than bad instincts. I'm not entirely certain how she'll react to the castration: I will be bringing her treats and spending time with her to help acclimatize her and the little ones to me.
The six goslings are doing great on mostly-grass with a handful if starter-plus-nutritional-yeast every now and again.
Mama embden had no eggs under her, so I gave her 5 ancona eggs. It was a bit of a process to get them to her but if she's going to sit she needs to sit on something.
Other than that: did a little fencing, kicked the rooster out of the garden (not in that order), turnips are up, tomatoes are doing well outside (I'm covering them on cold nights). There's a frost due in 2 or 3 nights.
Now I'm calculating the number of pots I'll need for the deck garden and how much soil I'll need.
I've been fighting some hard days, especially since I wrote that plant retrospective post. Even those tiny, safe windows into my past tha I have access to leave me dissociative, irritable, and with the equivalent emotional feeling to the physical of really intense burns or some other constant searing pain. I think I'm coming out of it a little now.
That experience, the feeling of just having the emotional pain switch set "on" regardless of what I think about or do... I've got better at handling my actions while it's on, sometimes, but there's often just no way to make it go away while it's happening. Many hours of hard labour a day are hella preventative. I need to pump up my bike tires and make sure they hold air, or start running, or something. The farm is intense work but not the same.
Speaking of the farm: I got new geese on the weekend. I was supposed to get 3 new geese: a pilgrim gander (good for a spread of genetics) and a pair of white Chinese. There was a lady in town trying to get rid of them. When she showed up, she said that the gander had an abcess from fighting (there were 2 ganders and 1 goose at her place) and she was inclined to keep him back and keep compresses etc on the swelling. I took the pair of white Chinese and gave her a pilgrim girl who'd been sitting on a nest, then lost her nest. That way her gander could have a companion, and he wouldn't have the Chinese geese to fight with.
I put my lovely, sweet, calm new geese in the strip of grass by the road: lots of room, fenced in away from the dogs and other geese, lots of grass and dandelions. I checked them a couple times, left them water, and came into the house. A couple hours later Avallu came to get me, whining: I'm not sure if it was because he was locked out of that area or because he knew something was wrong. He led me over to the new goose field.
I found the beautiful new goose semi-hanging by one wing. Her wing was impaled on a nail through a 2x4, the nail went all the way through. She could reach the ground, she wasn't quite on tiptoe, but she was not able to pull herself off or stand/lie down comfortably. She was just hanging there. I took her off and she bled a fair bit, steadily, a couple big drips per second. I brought her into the house, put corn starch on the wound, and then took her back out to be with her gander. She drank some water but her wing was hanging -- how long had she been out there?
Tucker was coming over for dinner anyhow. I debated with myself and did a bunch of internet research: I had some penicillin, a long-acting and a quick-acting one, for the pigs. There were no on-label instructions for poultry or geese, and very little online. Should I give her an antibiotic and risk getting it wrong (doseage and also it's very hard to intramuscularly inject a goose with a solid 3" pad of feathers on the breast) or should I wait and see if there was an infection, then have to hit her harder with antibiotics? In the end I gave her the long-acting one, 0.35ml in the left breast. She had stopped bleeding by then. I confined her and her gander in the goose nesting space beside the back door so I could keep an eye on them: she was and has been pretty pale but is standing and walking and moving. Her wing continues to trail a little, I have no idea how much damage was done to it. I don't see fresh blood.
I feel terrible about it: I hadn't expected the geese would climb on that pile of boards, and didn't really give those nails a second thought as I would have if I'd put pigs or something in there. Also, both geese are so sweet and calm, they haven't hissed once and they're great with people. And they are beautiful graceful birds.
That would have been Saturday; also Saturday I noticed Apricot's vulva was swelling and she was bagging up, so I put hay in all the pig houses (I learned!). Sunday there were 7 healthy active new piglets trying to nurse. I have to admit, I have trouble with very new piglets: when they're born they tend to be skinny and shivery for a couple days and I worry about them. I worry about them enough that I put off castrating, in fact, and then after a couple days they're fat and running around everywhere.
Apricot is not as chill with me around her babies as Penny was: I scratch behind her ears but haven't got in the house with her. She's still learning how not to squish them: she'll sit down slowly but still catch one and get up again, then be a little distressed. I consider this to be new mother issues rather than bad instincts. I'm not entirely certain how she'll react to the castration: I will be bringing her treats and spending time with her to help acclimatize her and the little ones to me.
The six goslings are doing great on mostly-grass with a handful if starter-plus-nutritional-yeast every now and again.
Mama embden had no eggs under her, so I gave her 5 ancona eggs. It was a bit of a process to get them to her but if she's going to sit she needs to sit on something.
Other than that: did a little fencing, kicked the rooster out of the garden (not in that order), turnips are up, tomatoes are doing well outside (I'm covering them on cold nights). There's a frost due in 2 or 3 nights.
Now I'm calculating the number of pots I'll need for the deck garden and how much soil I'll need.
